For anyone who has moved between cities before, they have probably experienced major headaches over their furniture. Selling and throwing away old furniture or buying furniture for the new place may be stressful for many. Jenny Soo Jung Park has come up with Rovell, a modular furniture rental system for globetrotters – those who travel frequently and stay for short periods of time.

Dear Readers, Vidafine had a chance to visit the OCAD UniversityIndustrial Design Thesis show in May and is excited to share with you some cool finds! The scope of their thesis topics were broad, ranging from innovative products to holistic systems and services “that would change the way we live, think, work and play”. The overall success of the show demonstrated the amount of hard work the students have put in the last 9 months. It was a difficult choice, but we have selected two projects to showcase. We hope that these posts inspire you to think creatively and also to gain a new perspective in the role design plays in your everyday life.

Eat+Learn – Ansis Kalnins

As a student working around tight timelines and schedules, it is difficult to maintain a balanced diet and nearly impossible to find the time to go grocery shopping. That is why I was drawn to this particular project by Ansis Kalnins that aims to help many young students to learn how to eat properly. One of the main challenges is the multitude of food planning decisions that happen when they go grocery shopping. Eat+Learn is a food suggestion platform tailored specifically for these students. It clearly and simply shows them how to assemble complete meals right there in the grocery store.

When you were a child, did you enjoy being read to? Smories is a website filled with a library of original children stories, read by kids. This website was the outcome of Lisa Swerling and Ralph Lazar’s insight on children’s interest in reading to one another. What I like about Smories is that it is fully aware of childrens’ increasing obsession with the internet. Children could easily be browsing content that is not suitable for them. Smories acts as a safe alternative and a healthy environment for children to be on the internet.

Design Thinking is the only problem solving approach for innovation and design firm IDEO. It is a human-centered and design-based way of thinking for, well, pretty much everything. One of the key points of this type of thinking is to gather inspiration and insights from every possible source and should involve people from many different backgrounds and disciplines. Design thinking is participatory. You cannot have a good idea if you do not begin with lots of ideas. Simply put, IDEO is a big advocate for collaborative processes.

Earlier this month, IDEO launched a project called OpenIDEO. It is an open platform for people to work with IDEO on some social innovation projects. It is a place for creative thinkers to contribute ideas or to simply inspire others. But of course, people like you and me are invited to join the conversation too. OpenIDEO is an experiment put out by IDEO to see if the collaboration of small teams and the broader community can accomplish better results. Crowdsourcing harnesses the power of the community to address global challenges through collaboration.

Did you know that all your household cleaners contain more water content than the actual cleaning solution? That’s right, your trusty cleaning product contains mostly of what you can easily get from your tap. Canadian startup company Planet People “tapped” into the innovative idea of completely eliminating water content from cleaning products. Their cleaning product named iQ is a 3.5″ tall refill cartridge of concentrated cleaning solution. To use it, simply add tapwater into their specially designed, multi-use spray bottle, insert the cartridge and then twist on the spray nozzle to start releasing the cleaning agent into the water. Once the cartridge runs out, just buy a new one and reuse the same spray bottle.

We live in a culture where virtually everything is mass-produced in some distant factory by technologically advanced machines that use industrial processes that we cannot even begin to understand. Sadly, this production system disconnects us from the objects we come into contact with everyday. As the objects begin to lose its meaning, it will easily be replaced by something newer and trendier. Luckily, Aurelie Tu’s Portland, Oregon based company, Crafted Systems, rejects the mass-produced and reinvents the meaning of handcraft in their collection of beautifully handmade felt products. Through her travels and exploration of different cultural handcrafts, she was inspired to marry traditional hand techniques with modern aesthetics.